If you followed this blog over the last two years, you might have noticed that I was never a huge fan of the Burning Crusade expansion. I mostly criticized it for being too little, too late, not enough content for 2 years, plus having a raid endgame that wasn't accessible for a large enough number of players. So I have taken several breaks during that time, and not played WoW all the time. But today I checked my level 70 characters, and just adding up the time spent at level 70, adding a bit for leveling from 60 to 70, plus the complete /played time on my blood elf mage, I concluded that I have played the Burning Crusade for about 1,000 hours.

Now if I look back at the Burning Crusade, and forward towards Wrath of the Lich King, my point of view hasn't changed much. I think WotLK is late too, and I don't think it will have enough content, even with added patches, to last us for another 2 years. And while I have hope for the new raiding game, I'm not taking it for granted that it will really be better for casual raiders. But having said all this, I think I could play another 1,000 hours in Wrath of the Lich King. And that can't be all bad. How many single-player games would I have to buy to get 1,000 hours of content?

I loved TBC, but I'm not as excited about WotLK. Yes, there's lots of new content, but even with all of Blizzard's changes to the end game, raiding is still an activity that requires a significant amount of preparation ahead of time, and then a fairly large block of free time, like 3-4 hours, to enjoy. So much in WoW is designed to be a time sink, and I just don't have as much time to waste anymore.

Actually, the game I'm really enjoying these days is LOTRO. It's easy to play casually, and the Mines of Moria expansion looks like it might be good. Is there something wrong with me? :D

My first WoW break came about a couple of months into Burning Crusade. I got my main to 70 - realised I was never going to be able to raid and then just drifted off. I drifted back long enough to level another character to 70 on the other faction with some friends but by that time there wasn't anyone much running anything except heroics. I expected to want to go back for Lich King but don't really. Burning Crusade put me off WoW.

Blaming the burning crusade for the raiding at max level formula is silly. While raiding is still the main activity of the end game, TBC actually brought in more to do at max level to advance. PvP epics, heroics and dailies being the most notable.

Looking forward to Wrath blizzard has said they want to ease the entry requirements to see the raids and have fun doing so. Naxx 10 is being designed to be as easy as Kara is now, with everyone pimped out in at least PvP epics. Hopefully the 10 mans will have a gentle upwards progression, and the 25 mans will be left for 'teh hardcore'

Some friends were lucky and got a beta key, and one levelled so quickly to 80 that I want to ask: Is this game really all about raiding? I was looking forward to have some quality time with Northrend, questing there and "smelling the roses". Now it really seems I will level up very quickly regardless if I am going for it or not. Just to enter instances that are shorter and easier than ever. To get achievements like killing the boss while doing this or that silly thing. ^^^

Another downer is that I know the game. The models just get re-used, I have seen 99% of them already before in Classic and TBC. Northrend is said to have bigger zones, but it still is rather small compared to Classic.

I had the same feeling with Guild Wars after the 2nd expansion and the 3rd "smaller" addon or whatever they called Eye of the North. But "Nightfall" was probably the best expansion. But even NF did not have more world to explore than the classic Guild Wars.

What I want is a Classic size expansion. But this would take years, and then it would still be the same game.

Maybe it is just about time for a new game, Blizzard is already working on their new super secret MMO, after all...^^

addendum: FLYING MOUNTS made the world so much smaller. And were the defining new feature of TBC. I love flying mounts and it was fun at first, but it totally destroys open world pvp, bottlenecks and avoiding them if you do not want to get ganked and so on. Open PvP nowadays is a few places on Quel'Danas. But not only PvP, it makes the world so much smaller - very much like map travel in Guild Wars, but even worse somehow.

So all I really loved about the BC expansion was badges of justice, which is not that much actually.

I thought TBC was painfully overtuned at the start. And they've fallen into the habit of hugely overtuning new content when they patched it in to keep the hardcore busy.And then nerfing it several months down the line.

It puts a huge amount of stress on less hardcore guilds. Because what do you do when you just can't progress? You bleed raiders is what you do.

There's been great things about it (flying mounts are top of my list, the questing in general has been great and I love the Arrakoa lore), but I really do hope that they don't overtune WotLK in the same way.

Not having played much end-game in WoW pre-TBC due to my casual playing style, I enjoyed the first expansion a lot. TBC has given me the opportunity to experience a lot more of the end-game content than vanilla WoW.

Seeing as how WotLK will repeat and improve the way how casual players like me can access the end-game, personally I am looking forward to the second expansion very much.

I step back from my emotional involvement in WoW month on month, year on year, expansion on expansion. Meanwhile, I have all the fun in the world enjoying LOTRO (Hiya, thora! You are not alone) and the much better crafting system therein. Also, I can indulge more in the questlines, love the more down to earth atmosphere. After I returned from LOTRO (which I played for a couple of months with great delight) WoW looked like a freak show with over-colored Muppets. I don't gain any particular joy from the new raiding content or the extended skill system. The Deathknight will be a nice addition and I will certainly play one. WoW is losing its fascination but there are still some gems in this game. And I would love to play the shorter instances, if that feature will be brought to life, that would be great!

You can't really say 1 000 hours of content. If you did every quest, every instance and every battleground only once, it would be more like 50 to 80 hours. And thus you shouldn't compare playing time of a single player game with MMO. There are no time sinks (no dailies, no honour or mat farming), no hanging around, chatting or trading on AH in single player games. The time you spent in the game need not correspond to the quantity of the content in it.

The other thing you need to consider is that in those two years, you also paid something like $360 USD plus $50 for the expansion, so $410. Was TBC worth $350ish dollars? (still giving some of that to classic WoW I suppose)

In terms of "price per hour" I cant think of a more efficient way to be entertained.

Hell, I can even add on the price of the new PC I bought, plus the ISP subscription (both of which I use for other, none-wow things and would have anyway) I even went out and spent money on a real nice comfy chair as I was spending so much time in front of the PC....

Even with all those things, it's STILL cheaper than for example going to watch a film at the cinema !

The Burning Crusade was a disappointment IMHO. Leveling from 60-70 wasn't bad, HOWEVER end game sucked.

Karazhan, the first real raid was TOO difficult compared to the 5-man dungeons people had been running. Keep in mind at that time many people didn't run heroics because they required keys that required a lot of rep in a perticular faction. Lets not even start on how raid ID's really put the final blow to my guild's attempts to clear Kara. I gave up on raiding all together.

Raiding aside, I played a lot of PvP and Arena. Both of these end game alternatives provided comparable, or even better gear then raiding. The downside was the grind. Getting a s1/s2 weapon from battlegrounds took 10-15 hours of playing. Getting my characters in full PvP epics took months of grinding. Grinding being the key word.

Currently end game WoW is amazing. Since patch 3.0 everything is great. I've gone back to a lot of the raid dungeons I ignored before. With all the raids being nurfed things are a lot easier, but also everyone has better gear and understanding of how the fights go. Kara can be easily pug'd and thats how it should of been from the start. According to everyone in beta this will be how WotLK is, and I'm excited.

If you play 1,000 over two years, then roughly you spent $400, which is 0.40/hour. Compared to console games, this is a great "rate/hour" - console games would need to be under $20 to compete given their depth.

Now how much time out of those 1,000 hours are spent jumping in shatt on vent....

I raided pre-BC and realized that the time dedication was not something I could commit. So, my view is somewhat different from yours. However, I thoroughly enjoyed BC. The addition of daily quests was a great move as well as the changes to PvP. It gives players like me a chance to do meaningful things. Pre-BC endgame was painfully limited for the log-on-when-he-has-time player.

Raids were made incredibly more accessible than before. Blizz gets a lot of flak, but they really made a fabulous game.

Then again I don't know how many hours I played BC--my guess is fewer than even 1000. So maybe the real secret to enjoying the game is to take it in doses and not as fast as you can.

The actual zones and questing. Every zone - particularly the first time through - was a pleasure. Well, maybe not my nemesis zone of Blade's Edge! Even that was exciting the first time through. But Blizzard really put into practice in the expansion the idea that lots of quests that are easy to find and give a great return and are *fun* (there were a fair amount of kill and collection quests, but there were also a lot more gimmick quests or ones that required some additional work mixed in - so that if you worked toward the gimmick one, you usually got the kill/loot one as a bonus- that was brilliant)

The raiding.

I wasn't in a cutting-edge guild, but I still have to disagree that Kara was too hard to start with. It WAS hard, and my guild wiped a lot learning the fights, but it really made it rewarding when we did. I do think that there was a bit of an issue with 'nowhere to go' afterward with the 10/25 balance. And we were a newly formed guild, and didn't mix up enough, so first doing Gruul's it was two stranger-teams meeting in a lot of cases. So I'm looking forward to more tiers of 10 mans. Also, I think that splitting up the Tier gear between 10 and 25 mans was a bad design.

I also thought that a lot of the fights were just really cool. Not the rest of Tier 4 - Gruul's lair was boring and ugly and kind of disappointing to step into after Kara (which to this day I think is one of the most amazingly well designed instances of all), but SSC was just gorgeous and the T5 encounters well defined.

Things I was meh on:

The overall atmosphere at times. I like a little less space in my fantasy. Which is probably ironic, since the Blade's Edge was one of the least 'spacey' zones but I didn't like the design of it, or how awful it was to navigate without a flying mount. And somehow it was the place that bad quests went to die - I just never found myself enjoying those quests/lines as much.

Things I didn't like:

Arenas. I was really excited about the idea of 5 man arena teams, because I enjoyed my fair share of battlegrounds. What I discovered, though, is I enjoy objective-based PVP (halaa, BGs, etc) - i find nothing more boring than "which team can kill the other faster?" I say this as somebody who made Challenger first season, so it wasn't total sour grapes, but after that I really didn't play. Things weren't helped by the numbers of way the system could be exploited.

I played a lot, too. When TBC hit, I had one player at 60 and the rest alts. Now I have 5 at 70. And even on repeat content, I continue to have fun, because the mechanics for different classes handling stuff can be different. Of course, the real reason I play is guildies and friends and conversation make things far more interesting than it would be solo.

You can't measure value simply in hours played. Sure, the number of single player games with 1000+ hours of gameplay are almost non-existant. But how much of that 1000+ hours was spent having FUN, and how much was spent mindlessly grinding out gold for your 3 epic flying mounts, tokens for gear, etc. WoW is a massive time sink. Giving it credit for sucking you into the timesink does not make it a good game.

Single player games offer a much briefer experience, but it's far richer and more rewarding as a result. WoW (and all MMOs) dilute the experience so much that they're like the shadow of a game.

WoW is your weekly sit-com. Mildly amusing, and able to go on forever, but not exciting and severely lacking in substance. Single player games can be like a blockbuster movie - doesn't last for long, but is a real experience.

I agree with an earlier poster that I am disappointed that they are expecting us to level so fast. I enjoy the leveling, questing, exploring the most. The first arena season is in 1 month. If you don't powerlevel to 80 and get a start with everyone else you will be left behind. Its a shame because the world is beautiful and well crafted.

PvP End Game: Can't say, Wild horses couldn't drag me into that side of the game. I personally hate PvP.

Dungeons: OK, 4 out of 10. Heroic dungeons are just rehashed content. Once you have done any of the 5 times... you never want to go back ever again.

PvE End Game: As a score out of 10... zero, nada, zilch, nought, nothing... There is no PvE to keep players who can't raid or don't have the time to raid... once they are bored of dungeons.

RAIDING: Pathetic!!!

Kara was set as hardcore fest on day one that ripped guilds apart multiple times. Attunment was nuts as it required guilds to get attune at the same time... practically impossible if players had different commitments. Thus guilds forced apart.

The Heroic requirements of once being revered was plainly an attempt to block content to players. Again another reason guilds split as all players could not reach that level at same point in time.

Kara was too finely tuned too from the word go. One mistake in a 10 man group forced a wipe... great! A game that does not forgive for its first level 70 entry raid.

Hardcore raiders are a breed I could careless about... they do what they want... they will always spend 20 hours a day grinding the content down...

What this game has created though is a new form of pretend/wannabe/pseudo hardcore raider... This breed of player is now bitching about the current nerf of Kara and other raids.

When it is obviously clear that these wannabes would have not got there with the key attunment being dropped from kara, the heroic keys being dropped to honoured to purchase, the heroic raids to grind easy epics via badges... You had an easy route to raiding so don't pretend to be hard done by with the current nerfs.

Daily Quests: A static mind bore... the game turned a bunch of players into lab rats running the same crap everyday... how hard would it have been to mix it up a bit and introduce 10 more a month?

To be honest... tBC was a complete screw up for a silent majority... but the vocal minority got their way and the game they wanted.

My guild is planning to dungeon crawl to 80 and quite a few of them have taken a week off of work to do so. Keep in mind, this is a raiding guild but one on the casual side. They want to ding 80 as quickly as possible and still have all of the quests available to max rep in each area right away.

I'm fairly certain I'm not buying the expansion and I'll just happily fade from memory. Then again, I already quit once before and it didn't last. We'll see.

1) For the casual (can't commit large blocks of time), they added new races, JC, a new BG, and dozens of daily quests.

2) For the hardcore, they made WoW more about skill. Arenas require more skill than BG's, and the 10/25 raid structure excludes the unskilled from being carried along.

WotLK will be more of the same. More content for the casuals, and more challenge for the hardcore. DK's will require more skill to play than most other classes. The most bitter people will be the ones with too much time and not enough skill -- that will leave them nothing to do but level more alts.

1) Blood Elf and Draenai starting areas were very nicely done2) New alternatives to standard kill/collect quests (e.g. bombing runs, trampoline egg collect quest in Nagrand, wrangle an Ellek quest in Draenai starting zone, Blade's Edge gnome encampment quests)3) the vast majority of the 5-man dungeons were well executed and a lot of fun, even on repeated visits4) They made non-traditional class specs a little more raid viable (e.g. shadow priests, tanking druids and pallies)5) The token system for "buying" epics helped close that huge gap between investment vs. reward a little for raiders6) flying mounts

Bad Things About TBC:

1) New open world zones were hideous2) raiding beyond Kara was still clunky, tedious, and monotonous3) giving Alliance shammies and Horde pallies rather than creating some new, interesting classes4) dailies (I'll pass on more grind)5) The addition of e-sport arenas6) No development time invested in old areas, making Old World Azeroth a barren wasteland of empty instances

Overall, I'd say my hesitant return to TBC last year was an overall positive experience for the first few months. But two months in, the game just couldn't capture my imagination (or sub dollars) like WoW Classic did.

I think TBC was ok, my biggest disappointment is the drastic difference from "normal" content to "upper level" content. The zones seem to step up nicely and are well designed and varied. But a player just hitting 70 cant hope to run a heroic, and without running heroics or a severe amount of grinding, you cant progress. I think lacking an "entry" heroic, hampers the TBC endgame.

I thought the storylines and quests within TBC were kinda dull. But there were some interesting quests, such as the Caverns of Time stuff. I didn't really understand or get into much of the story, and it was more of seeing numbers increase (faction/gold/honor/arena and now achievements) in TBC.

I think WotLK can only be an improvement. I certainly wish they'd redo the low-level areas. With the ties to one's home faction, I felt the most involved in them; like you were making a difference in your community.

I still fail to see how anyone can enjoy the post-3.0-content. Yesterday our tank had a disconnect after the first 2 seconds of the fight. Didn't matter, that was enough time for him to build so much aggro that the mob never hit anything else. As DPS its horrible, if you're not a class that mostly relies on instant casts you won't even be able to cast anything before the mob goes down. And as a healer I feel useless because nobody takes any damage out of a boss fight.I get the feeling that people who said "Raiding was too hard" or "Not enough content" did something wrong: You were not supposed to call it quits after hitting 70. And you also shouldn't have run into Kara in greens and leveling blues. You were supposed to run every 70s instance at least 3 times to get 70s blues. Combined with the quests and an occasional leveling instance this should have been enough to push you to revered with the acording faction. And after several heroics and getting some crafted epics, Kara wouldn't been so hard, at least after the first nerf long time ago.And the only time I heard someone say "I can't get attuned to Kara" is when a former hardcore raider leveled a bit slower than the rest and don't wanted to PUG it, which is certainly possible.

On topic:- quests & instances: Two steps foreward and one backwards. Both became more focussed, less trash but in some cases also less storyline-driven. Blizzard became better at their craft but in some cases it felt artificial and soulless. I still prefer it over the old ones though.

- raids: What I saw was great. I wished it had more 10-man-instances, something even more difficult than ZA would have been great. Also the idea of additional rewards like the ZA-bear was incredible. I just wish they would make sure those goals are not trivialised by better gear.

- daily quests: Not so great. My tolerance for repeated content is kind of big but the daily cooking quest really begins to annoy me after more than half a year of NOT getting my damn chocolate cake receipt. Sunwell isle introduced quite an inflation, people liked that they had more money, but they got angry when the prices went up acordingly.

- PvP: Well..its better than the old system, where only unemployed accountsharers could get epics. But it still sucks big time. We have a blue statement, that they only guarantee balance in 5vs5. Then why the hell can you get ratings, titles, mounts, epics from unbalanced brackets like 2vs2 and 3vs3? Battlegrounds can be fun sometimes, but if you want to get epics you have to mindlessly grind it for weeks and months, which sprouts behavior like afk'ing. It kind of amuses me though, that the typical PvPer likes his PvP better because its "less boring and more challenging" and then he grinds bg-epics running thousands of alteracs in a row and searches for a restro-druid to team up with. In the end..this game would be better of with no pvp at all, I don't expect improvements in Wrath.

All in all it was a well done addon, but their try to make it nice for everybody leaded to it being perfect for nobody.

"tBC was a complete screw up for a silent majority... but the vocal minority got their way and the game they wanted."

What nonsense. The poor silent majority had a simple option - press the quit button and cancel their subscription! WoW would have gone down the tubes and we all would have been playing WAR of LotR, not about to play a new expansion.

You seem to think that people are either 'hardcore 20 hours a day' raiders, or complete idiots who couldn't even get their Kara attunement done without a wet nurse (4 normal instances, big deal).The fact is the vast majority of people were somewhere in between these 2 extremes.

Back on topic:

The biggest block to raiding (and the biggest mistake Blizzard made) was SSC attunement.It was very difficult to achieve in the early days, because it meant having to get Revered reputation with factions and it also meant killing the Heroic Instance End Bosses, and that was no easy task.

I could understand the need for BT attunement a lot more, because once it was dropped, people ditched SSC and TK and went straight to Mount Hyjal and BT. Kaelthas was too hardcore for most groups, and should have been easier, then there would have been less of a wall to progression.

As far as questing/solo play in BC, I think people didn't like the environments that much, simply because they were too alien. Nagrand is probably everyone's favourite area because it is the most Earth-like.

Was there enough content? Probably not enough different content for people levelling alts, but generally I think there was a huge amount to do. Once I had run out of the solo content, I was lucky enough to have the time available to raid, and I really enjoyed them all - Kara, SSC, TK, MH and BT. I didn't get to Sunwell before the nerf patch, so as far as raiding goes, it was a big success for me.

I both loved and hated tBC. - Hated the raid setup, watched it destroy countless guilds I was involved in or knew about. - Hated the introduction of arenas (although one could probably argue successfully that arenas were independent of the expansion). - Hated the space theme with a burning passion (for the record I hated EQ's Luclin expansion as well)

But there were good gems in there. - I think questing was much tighter in Outlands. - Jewelcrafting was fun, Daily quests came into being and while somewhat repetitive they were good. - Kara was a well done raid even though I objected quite loudly to it being a roadblock to 25 mans instances.- Flying mounts were an excellent decision that I wish they'd carry over to their natural conclusion and let us fly in old WoW.- Gear options, IMO, were greatly expanded. Badges, Rep, 5 mans, heroics, Raids, BG's, Arenas, and crafting all gave many and varied paths to obtaining equipment.- Looks: Visually outlands was such a stark contrast to old world. The sky, in particular, in most zones was SO striking. I used to love looking at the infernals streaking down in SMV. It was so awe inspiring the first time I went there.- I think hybrids came much more into their own in BC. I remember in old WoW that paladins and druids were used for pretty much one thing only: "Get in the back and heal". Sure there were a few that broke the mold but pre-BC Warriors were pretty much the most viable option for tanking and even healing was more difficult if you weren't a priest.

I'm not as hyped about Wrath as I was about BC but I think I'm much more prepared for what we're going to get. I find myself immensely curious about the story of wrath and it seems, from all beta accounts, to be much more rich and detailed in Wrath. I'm looking forward to experiencing it myself.

Longasc, all of the 5-man heroic achievements are about accomplishing something difficult (for the most part. There are a few that are easy, but most of them are damn hard).

Intense Cold: Never let the fight debuff reach more than 2 stacks.

Boss can root people. Rooted people still get stacks of the debuff. Moving removes the debuff. Key to getting achievement: keep moving at all times. Requires: quick reaction times and a good healer that knows how to heal quickly vs efficiently, as well as break roots IMMEDIATELY. (I do not think this will be possible with dru/sham without another cleanser in the party)

Moving along to more obvious difficulty, in one of the Nerubian instances, there is a fight with a boss that summons an add 'swarm', and periodically summons an elite that makes the swarmers immune to all damage.

The achievement attached to this fight? Never killing a single one of the elites. Ever. Never ever. Tell me that's not going to be hard.

Achievements like this are a GOOD thing because they give people an incentive to do something HARD for once, rather than take the easy way out or do the encounter the obvious and most efficient manner.